Hello hello!

I have a confession to make — I’m a technology and adventure fiend. These two characteristics have played a defining role in my young adult life. So when I find someone who seems to has these same passions, I get very excited.

A couple weeks ago, I came across a polish blogger who shares this passion for technology and adventure. Marek runs the blog Paddling with a camera which is basically a study of photography and kayaking. He features great reviews of adventure themed cameras and takes some stunning shots as well.

Here are some of my favorite posts:

10 Tips How to Avoid Blurry Pictures when Shooting from a Kayak
Do You Paddle with Your Dog? K-9 Kayaking
20 Paddling and Photography Destinations
Paddling Photography in September (2005-2008)
Paddling with Pixel, the Water Corgi

And some awesome shots:

Use some of Marek’s great tips and take some shots yourself on one of our kayaking tours!

Here is a profile I found of not your typical Indoor Skydiver –

Sue Noyes, 55, of Berkeley does her skydiving at 30 feet and under. She climbs inside a vertical wind tunnel and flies in the pressure created by a set of fans.

Why: I have always been an athlete, dancer and a little bit of an adrenaline junkie. Over the past two years, I have had to scale back because of arthritis. Looking for a way to get a fun and challenging workout that was kind to my joints, I checked out indoor skydiving.

Greatest accomplishment: Becoming a Level 2 tunnel flier. I have learned how to fly on my belly, back and in a sitting position as well as a number of transitions like barrel rolls and flips. My goal is to become a Level 3 flier by the end of this year, which means I have to learn how to fly upside down.

Gear you can’t live without: My second-hand helmet with purple wing decals. Once I become a Level 3 flier, I will reward myself with a custom flight suit.

Where you train: I fly at iFly SF Bay in Union City. The instructors make you believe that anything is possible.

Time you get up in the morning: My cat gets me up around 7 a.m.

Best time to train: I like to train in the evenings when the really good fliers are there. I always learn from watching their form and transitions.

Most annoying thing people assume about athletes in your sport: People always say that they do not want to try indoor skydiving because they are afraid of heights. Everyone starts out flying on their belly about 3 feet off the floor with an instructor holding on to them. The instructors make sure that you do not progress to the next level until you are ready.

Advice you give a rookie: Relax and smile and embrace the intoxicating feeling of actually flying. It is amazing.

Article Link: SF GATE -Rising to the challenge of indoor skydiving

If you want give it a whirl yourself — Indoor Skydiving Los Angeles!

Hello all! I’ve always had a fascination with photography and have recently been putting a lot of thought in to picking it up as a hobby. So I started wondering which one of our activities would produce the most exciting pictures and so far Indoor Skydiving has been the most intriguing. A subject suspended twirling in the air is something that you can’t see every day and would be a blast to photograph. Here are some of the best shots I found on the web.

Hello all! We recently released our TV commercial into the wild and the response so far has been overwhelmingly positive! So in order to thank you all for spreading the word we decided to throw an awesomely free activity in the mix.

All you have to do is go watch our video on youtube, and tell us what you think by posting a comment. At the end of the month (August 31st 2010) we will randomly select two lucky commenter and give each of them a free Laguna Beach Kayaking Tour for Two!

So just click the picture to watch the video, comment and go kayaking!

Hola! Travelling has been a definitely positive influence on my life. It’s always been a reliable source for inspiration, motivation and, most importantly, self-knowledge. Nothing stirs the creative juices like getting out of your comfort zone while emerging yourself into a foreign culture. Moreover, soon after your first adventure, travelling has a tendency to assess every aspect of your life. One will strive to achieve the excitement and utter bliss that arises from that long leap away from home. However, the self-knowledge that these adventures have brought me surpasses all the other positives.

Travelling is not just about exploring new places on the outside. I believe that while you travel you are also exploring yourself. One does this by gauging their own reactions to completely new stimuli, stepping outside of their boundaries, and usually attempting something that they would have never dreamed of in the bubble that is there home.

This is why I will always push people to travel. A lot of people will complain about the price tag, but there are always ways to travel cheaply. Also, travel is a direct investment into yourself. The the experiences will change you and the memories will last you a lifetime. This is why I travel, and I hope these quotes will provide some inspiration, and nudge you in that new direction

1. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” –Mark Twain

2. “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” – St. Augustine

3. “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

4. “The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.” –Samuel Johnson

5. “All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.” – Paul Fussell

6. “Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” – Jack Kerouac

7. “He who does not travel does not know the value of men.” – Moorish proverb

8. “People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.” – Dagobert D. Runes

9. “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” – John Steinbeck

10. “No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.” – Lin Yutang

11. “Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty-his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.” – Aldous Huxley

12. “All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.” – Samuel Johnson

13. “For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

14. “Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” – Cesare Pavese

15. “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller

16″A traveler without observation is a bird without wings.” – Moslih Eddin Saadi

17. “When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.” – D. H. Lawrence

18. “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.” –Freya Stark

19. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – Mark Twain

20. “Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” – Miriam Beard

21. “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” – Martin Buber

22. “We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.” –Jawaharial Nehru

23. “Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.” – Paul Theroux

24. “To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.” – Bill Bryson

25. “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

50 inspiring travel quotes

Universal Studios Sneak Preview

Kijubi Julie and I

Last night the Kijubi team was invited to a special preview event for Universal Studio’s new King Kong 3d ride. Also, it was an extra special event for me because it was actually my first time at Universal Studios. The reception was splendid, lots of schmoozing with other travel industry folks and, I must say, the food and drinks were quite adequate to ensure a great night no matter how the ride turned out

After socializing for a bit, Kijubi Julie and I jumped on the studio tour and headed out to the ride. The King Kong 3d ride is actually part of the studio tour. You sit in the same train of cars that serve the tour and they take you to Skull Island — a huuuuuge jungle themed sound stage, where  you are enclosed in a gigantic 3D movie screen bubble. Moreover, according to Peter Jackson, who narrated the event, the largest 3d screen in the world!

My best King Kong impression

So the ride is actually not really a ride at all. You stop on a hydraulic platforms that moves around — the ones where you stay in the same place but the seats and screen trick you into thinking that you’re moving. However, instead of just facing forward, you’re free to look in all directions since the screen is all around you. However, the best part is definitely that you are provided with those futuristic fancy specs and everything is in the most stunning 3d! Just think of being in a 360 degree Avatar movie where the seats move with the action. And yes, it really is as fun as it sounds! Actually, it feels much more real than that — so real that you actually get wet!

After the journey to Skull Island ends, you continue the studio tour which is what you would expect, you meander through movie sets and learn a good deal about the film making process and Universal history. After the studio tour, on Julie’s recommendation, we ran to the Mummy. Thankfully the park was closed to the public, no lines for us! I’m going to be pretty jealous of my experience the next time I go to any park.

The Mummy ride was great, very Indiana Jones-esque. I honestly can’t remember the last time I’ve been to a theme park, most likely before college (which is probably the reason why I can’t remember), so The Mummy brought back some long awaited nostalgia. We then headed out to Jurassic Park — a pretty fun log-style ride, meaning a big drop and some splashing. Thankfully an employee must have taken a liking to Julie because he directed us to the middle seats of the car which made us (almost) un-splashable.

As you can see, Julie is a huge Jaws fan

Julie and I then romped around the park a bit, took some interesting pictures and slowly made our way to the exits. It was 10pm which meant closing time and we had a long 60 mile drive ahead of us. Plus, we decided to do some Hollywood site-seeing* along the way so it was time to say goodbye to Universal Studios and hello to the road.

*On the topic of what happened in Hollywood — I must leave that information for another time and definitely another blog.

Indoor sports are all the rage these days — indoor soccer, arena football, indoor netball, and even indoor cricket. However, there is one sport that you might have never thought would don the indoor prefix — indoor skydiving. No we’re not high, although it’s not a stretch to say that the creators might have been a little under the influenced. And no, indoor skydiving does not require a very large hangar or a very small plane. Just a very tall wind-tunnel and a trampoline, seriously.

Skydiving is often deemed the ultimate rush, a life changing experience thats pretty much open to everyone — who’s not afraid of heights. Something about jumping from over 5,000ft up just makes a person think twice (more like 15 or 16 times). However, you can get a very similar thrill with indoor skydiving. It consists of a wind tunnel that stretches up to 100ft, a very large fan, and a trampoline like bottom. The fan generates winds from 80 to 150mph that suspend a flier over the trampoline so that the only thing that happens when you fall is that you gently bounce back up (if only real skydiving could have that reassurance).

There are three California locations for indoor skydiving. iFly, who’s catchy tagline is “Where people fly”, have locations in the San Francisco bay area and the Los Angeles area. Skydive Perris also has a vertical wind tunnel in Perris, CA.

What Kijubi doing?

Recipe for a life altering adventure:

• One 30+ pound backpack full of camping supplies
• Two grueling 11 mile hikes to and from the secluded Havasupai Native American reservation in the bottom of the Grand Canyon.
• Good friends
• Sweltering 100+ degree heat
• A dash of this:



• A splash of this:



• And a lot of this:

Have you been to Shangri-la? No? Me neither. Too bad because it’s a utopian city first described by British author James Hilton. It’s depicted as a mystical, harmonious valley that’s synonymous with paradise on earth. Although if such a city exists is still a mystery, there is a place that comes extraordinarily close. However, like all legendary places, you have to cross some perilous terrain to get there.

The Grand Canyon is a desolate and foreboding place — its land is barren and only the toughest creatures can call it home. It only takes a quick glance to deem the two thousand foot walls impassible, and the blistering heat succeeds in deterring all but the most determined backpackers and canyon loving hippies.  However, like the old adage: ‘you can’t judge a book by its cover’ — there is definitely something extraordinarily surprising hidden deep within this place. No it’s not home to Shangri-la, it’s usually called Supai and its as damn close as you’re going to get.

Your journey starts at the very top of the canyon, overlooking the crimson red, bone dry terrain that seems to stretch over the horizon. Your 9 mile hike to the Havasupai village is eagerly beginning. You descend over a thousand feet in less than your first thousand steps, carefully trekking down switchbacks carved into the cliff-side. No signs of water await you in-between the canyon walls and the only signs of life are the eagles and vultures circling overhead, supply mules (Supai is the only place in the U.S.A where mail is still delivered by mules) and the surprisingly large lizards scattering away as you approach. You begin to question your decision as the canyon is beginning to feel more like an oven than a tropical paradise.

The first sign of water you see is a peculiar dampness in the middle of a canyon that disappears as quickly as your own water supply. After a couple more miles you notice that a small stream has punched its way through the large red boulders that dominate the landscape and now trickles in-between them. As you near the village, the stream gives way to a creek that guides your path. Small bushes and trees now guide you along as you pick up your pace to reach the village.

The Havasupai village mostly consists of small farms that enclose cows, horses and other animals, and a few houses that are dotted with satellite dishes. It’s a small agricultural community of about 600 people which mainly makes a living off the thousands of tourists that visit each year. A general store, café and church await your arrival and it’s the last place you can stock up before reaching the campgrounds.

The campgrounds are a short 2-mile hike away. As you get nearer, and the roar of the water gets louder and your motivation grows. A long dirt path descends past the first of many stunning waterfalls and soon you’re in the midst of dozens of, literally, happy campers. There are plenty of places to establish your campsite, and also a freshwater spring that provides you with needed fluids.

The beautiful thing about Supai is that it’s ever-changing. Yearly floods invade and shift the land so that the paths of rivers are never the same and new waterfalls spring up as old ones disappear.  Here are some of the destinations that I recently enjoyed:

Yet-unnamed Falls

In August 2008 a Havasu Creek dam burst after days of very heavy rain. The floodwaters caused the evacuation of the entire village and resulted in one devastating casualty, Navajo Falls. The falls were around 70 feet tall and actually consisted of two separate falls that converged into one.  Thankfully, Navajo was replaced by another, yet-unnamed waterfall. The new waterfall is very wide and about 30ft high, with plenty of places to jump from. However, the most intriguing part about it is the you can walk behind the fall, and there is a sitting area naturally carved in to the wall!

Havasu Falls

A very short hike from the campgrounds, Havasu Falls is the second waterfall in the canyon. It’s one 120-foot chute off a vertical cliff. It spills in to many different pools that invite lots of lounging, splashing, and horse play. Also, there are a few places to climb around and behind the falls for the more adventurous crowd looking for a cliff-jump.

Quartz Mine

A half-mile hike from Navajo Falls and up a 100 foot embankment is a system of tunnels that formerly housed a quartz mine. Head lamps and shoes with a rubber sole are required as there are plenty of places where a misstep would cause a quick end to your journey. The first four levels are accessible by scaling down a few holes (thankfully the ropes are already in place), while the rest of the mine is blocked off by rocks and rubble.

Mooney Falls

The largest falls of the canyon, which feature a 210 foot vertical drop, are named after Jame Mooney – a miner who tried to scale the falls with an injured colleague tied to his back and subsequently fell to his death.  In order to get to the bottom of the falls, you must scale down the cliff using a system of strategically placed chains and ladders. Like Havasu Falls, there are also plenty of places to lounged and swim and also a couple of good jumps. If you walk away from the falls, you’ll see a hiking trail that will lead you to a mysterious ladder about 30 feet of the ground that leads you to a cave a few hundred feet above the bottom. Thankfully, none of my friends thought they were skilled enough to make the climb.

Beaver Falls

The fourth set of major falls in the canyon is located about a three and a half mile hike from camp. This hike is the most gorgeous I’ve ever been on, with many areas featuring dense vegetation stretching from wall to wall. It’s more reminiscent of a South American jungle than anything you would find in the Grand Canyon – thankfully without the enormous bugs and warring guerrilla factions. The Beaver falls are a system of three or four waterfalls that spill into a large pool that’s perfect for swimming cliff jumping. The east side of the cliff features two platforms, 40 and 50 feet respectively, that offer the best jumping the canyon has to offer. The pool also has a small cove at the far end that provides the faint of heart an excellent place to watch the crazy people jump.

I must stress that no words, pictures, or even those fancy moving pictures can truly encompass the natural beauty that Supai and only Supai posses. The water is the bluest and clearest I’ve ever seen! The people are even named after it – Havasupai means ‘people of the blue green waters’.  Also it is a place of deep contrasts, the lush and green canyon bed and the barren red walls of the canyon. It’s truly unimaginable until you’ve actually seen Supai with your own eyes.

The closest thing I have near home is a canyoneering adventure in the Los Angeles San Gabriel Mountains, so I urge you all to go and visit Supai. However, please note that you might have to make the camping reservation up to a year in advance, and if you’re not happy with that, you can go to Shangri-la.

Hello all! Despite the schizophrenic weather, summer is slowly creeping up on us. We here at Kijubi are continually growing anxious — it’s not easy sitting in our Laguna Beach office during the summer time — so we brainstormed a list of activities that we’re planning on doing this summer.

Thalia St. Beach, a short 30 second walk from Kijubi Headquarters

• Boat rentals and charters in Los Angeles and Orange County
• Brunch Cruises in Los Angeles, San Francisco and more
• Dinner Cruises in Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and more
• Indoor Skydiving in Los Angeles and San Francisco
• Jet Ski rentals in California and Florida
• Kayaking tours and rentals, California and Florida
• Motorcycle Rentals in California and Florida
• Surfing lessons and camps in Los Angeles, Orange County, and San Diego

If you have any other summer activities in mind, please share in the comments!